Re: lo terspu be la Nik. .e la Xorxes .e la Goran

[Logical Language Group <lojbab>]

la .and. cusku di'e

> > > XU do doi Nik. penmi le selnei gihe pendo vau be mi beho pohu lehi kosta
> > > gehu ku la melbi borno tcadu ckule bantadni stura?
> >
> > la melbi borno ????
> > (to noi ciska to'o la pitsi burgo toi)
> 
> One of the many likeable features of Lojban is that the grammar generates
> every possible lexeme, even those with no sense. "borno" "pitsi" and
> "burgo" are gismu & are grammatical - the only problem is they haven't
> been assigned a sense. But within a la-sumti, this doesn't really
> matter.

I think this claim is false, or if true, is true only in an extended sense
of "grammatical".  A form like "*la melbi borno" is generated by the Lojban
grammar only in the sense that "*the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the
wabe" is generated by the English grammar: both forms are fine on the syntactic
and morphological levels, but happen to use words that aren't in the lexicon.

Lojban tolerates extensibility in the lexicon, but not among words of
phonological shape CVCCV or CCVCV; the list of those is fixed.
"borno" is not a word of Lojban; it could have been a word of Lojban in
a closely related possible world, but that's quite a different claim.
(In other words, I consider "zoi borno scritchifizsted borno" to be
ungrammatical, although the current machine parser accepts it happily.)

-- 
John Cowan		sharing account <lojbab@access.digex.net> for now
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.